Past analysis of social movements and social movement organizations has normally assumed a close link between the frustrations or grievances of a collectivity of actors and the growth and decline of movement activity. Questioning the theoretical centrality of this assumption directs social movement analysis away from its heavy emphasis upon the social psychology of social movement participants; it can then be more easily integrated with structural theories of social process. This essay presents a set of concepts and related propositions drawn from a resource mobilization perspective. It emphasizes the variety and sources of resources; the relationship of social movements to the media, authorities, and other parties; and the interaction among movement organizations. Propositions are developed to explain social movement activity at several levels of inclusiveness-the social movement sector, the social movement industry, and social movement organization.

Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory

Introduction 1 Contentious politics and social movements: Part I The Birth of the Modern Social Movement: 2 Modular collective action 3 Print and association 4 Statebuilding and social movements Part II From Contention to Social Movements: 5 Political opportunities and constraints 6 The repertoire of contention 7 Framing contention 8 Mobilising structures and contentious politics Part III The Dynamics of Movement: 9 Cycles of contention 10 Struggling to reform 11 Transnational contention/conclusion: the future of social movements

Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics

March 198 1, volume 26 In hisASQ article entitled "Qualitative data as an attractive nuisance," Matthew Miles (1 979) has written a disarmingly candid rendition of the perils of qualitative analysis. Unfortunately, his candor in admitting the existence of these perils was matched by few suggestions for overcoming them. As a result, his article, based on a four-year study of six public schools, leaves the readerwith a sense that qualitative analysis-and its implicit companion, the case study cannot yet be regarded a rational, much less scientific venture.

The Case Study Crisis: Some Answers

Appreciation of fine arts became a mark of high status in the late nineteenth century as part of an attempt to distinguish highbrowed Anglo Saxons from the new lowbrowed immigrants, whose popular entertainments were said to corrupt morals and thus were to be shunned (Levine 1988; DiMaggio 1991). In recent years, however, many high-status persons are far from being snobs and are eclectic, even omnivorous, in their tastes (Peterson and Simkus 1992). This suggests a qualitative shift in the basis for marking elite status-from snobbish exclusion to omnivorous appropriation. Using comparable 1982 and 1992 surveys, we test for this hypothesized change in tastes. We confirm that highbrows are more omnivorous than others and that they have become increasingly omnivorous over time. Regression analyses reveal that increasing omnivorousness is due both to cohort replacement and to changes over the 1980s among highbrows of all ages. We speculate that this shift from snob to omnivore relates to status-group politics influenced by changes in social structure, values, art-world dynamics, and generational conflict

/pdf/changing-highbrow-taste-from-snob-to-omnivore-55bwi74t20.pdf

Changing highbrow taste: from snob to omnivore*

Ethnographers and other students of interaction have documented the impact of status factors on students' success in school. Yet survey research data consistently show the absence of family background measure effects on high school grades. It is argued that conventional measures of family background fail to capture those cultural elements of status that make a difference in school interactions. Drawing on Weber's work on status groups and status cultures, and on Bourdieu's work on cultural capital, this paper reports the findings of an effort to assess the impact of one component of 'status culture participation-cultural capital-on one aspect of life chances-students' high school grades. A composite measure of cultural capital has a significant impact on grades, controlling for family background and measured ability. The pattern of relationships, however, differs strikingly by gender. It takes more than measured ability to do well in school. From Warner et al. (1944) and Hollingshead (1949) to Coleman (1961) and Cicourel and Kitsuse (1963), ethnographers have chronicled the impact of class on almost every aspect of the experience of American high school students. More recently, ethnomethodologists and constituent ethnographers have documented the impact of cultural styles on students' relationships with counselors (Erickson, 1975), test scores (Mehan, 1974), and classroom instruction (McDermott, 1977). Similarly, recent work in the status attainment tradition finds that measured intelligence explains no more than 15 to 30 percent of the variation in students' high school grades (Crouse et al., 1979; Sewell and Hauser, 1975). At the same time, however, measures of family socioeconomic status have been found to have a negligible impact on grades when

Cultural capital and school success: The impact of status-culture participation on the grades of U.S. high-school students

The last decade has witnessed a burgeoning of American high culture. The number of museums and theaters has increased, the number of orchestras, opera companies, and dance companies has skyrocketed, and attendance at all of them is up.1 Ironically, however, the upsurge in public enthusiasm has been accompanied by financial tension. Earnings from admission and ticket prices have risen far less quickly than expenses, traditional patrons have been unable or unwilling to bridge the gap, and inherently labor-intensive production systems, inflation, energy costs, urban fiscal crises, and constraints on ticket and admission fees promise to make the situation worse.2 The effect of this fiscal malaise has been to involve the government federal, state, and municipal in American high culture to a degree unprecedented in this country. In twelve years the National Endowment for the Arts' budget has grown from $3 million to $96 million, the number of state arts agencies has increased from 18 to 55, and the number of local arts councils has expanded from 175 to 900.3

Social class and arts consumption

Students of American society, from the times of Tocqueville and Veblen, have been concerned with the social role of high culture in a democracy. The debate over the extent and consequences of elite dominance of the arts constituency has been intensified in recent years by the rise of government support for the arts. Little is known about the social composition of the arts constituency. Drawing on 268 largely unpublished studies of visitors to museums and audiences of live performing arts, we conclude that the gender and age composition of the arts audience is little different from the general public. However, the social class composition is strikingly elite: audiences are better educated, of higher occupational standing and more affluent than the general populace. Conversely, blue-collar workers, individuals with low incomes or little education, and racial and ethnic minorities are found to be greatly underrepresented. Analysis of differences between and within art forms reveals that museums, particularly science and history museums, draw a broader audience than do performing arts events; frequent attenders within most forms are found to be more elite than irregular consumers. Assessment of audience composition trends since the early 1960s indicates no movement toward a broader inclusion of the public, suggesting that a recent expansion in the scale of arts activities and government subsidies has not been accompanied by a democratization of cultural consumption

Cultural Democracy in a Period of Cultural Expansion: The Social Composition of Arts Audiences in the United States

Social movements seeking to change the subordinate status of ethnic minorities have drawn activists from both the minority and dominant groups. Conflict has at times developed between movement members of these two groups. In a comparative analysis of three movements—the civil rights movement, the anti-slavery cause in the U.S., and the movement to abolish Untouchability in India—the sources of tension appear quite similar. Ideologically, minority group activists viewed themselves as more radical and committed to that particular cause than did their dominant group co-workers and were more for a strategy of minority group self-help. Organizational conflict arose as majority members disproportionately assumed decision-making positions in the movement. A third source of tension developed because some movement members were carriers of prejudices and hostilities of the larger social milieu. Outsiders frequently played essential roles in the early phases of these movements, but pressures developed on majority members to reduce involvement or withdraw altogether.

Majority Involvement in Minority Movements: Civil Rights, Abolition, Untouchability1

It is generally assumed that widespread public confidence in the government is essential for political stability in the U.S. and other advanced capitalist democracies. This legitimacy-stability thesis implies that individuals with little confidence in the government would be particularly prone to support political protest. However, theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that this thesis must be revised to include a third, interacting factor-the preexistence of an organized protest movement: low confidence in the government is likely to translate into protest support only when such a movement is present. Using data from a 1972 national survey, only moderate associations are found between several indices of confidence in the government and support for political protest, and these associations are significantly reduced when salient structural factors (e.g., race, unemployment, community involvement) are taken into account. These results are not expected under the widely accepted, unrevised, legitimacy-stability thesis. However, consistent with a revised version of the thesis, it is found that low confidence in the government is strongly associated with protest support among those groups whose interests were being actively promoted by visible protest movements. State legitimacy, the widespread public belief that the society's governing institutions and political authorities are worthy of support, is commonly held to be a precondition for political stability in advanced capitalist democracies. In fact, Lipset (a) has argued that a regime's legitimacy may even be a more important determinant of political stability than how well the regime actually performs. The legitimacy-stability relationship has become a central tenet of most contemporary analyses of American society, including both structural-functionalist and neo-Marxist formulations. Talcott Parsons, for instance, contends that without citizen faith in the political system, the government is incapable of attaining the society's collectively *The authors' names are in arbitrary order, as this was a collaborative effort. The data used in this paper were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research; the authors, however, take sole responsibility for the analysis and interpretation of these data. We are grateful to Gordon Fellman, Joseph Helfgot, Richard Wilsnack, Yoram Neumann, and two anonymous readers for valuable comments on an earlier draft.

Government Legitimacy and Political Stability

A central objective of the business mobilization of the late 1970s and early 1980s in both the United States and Great Britain was to restore company profits to levels of an earlier decade. In the name of “reindustrialization” and “recapitalizing capitalism,” government spending was targeted as the chief impediment to such prosperity.64 In the American case, government restraint on business decisions has also been named as a critical target. And in Britain, government failure to resist and control organized labor has been identified by business as a first priority as well. All point toward government reductions in social spending, the dismantling of programs that regulate business, and the scaling down of programs that benefit labor. The political thrust, electoral success, and continued commitment in office of the Thatcher and Reagan governments were in no small part a product of this business rush into politics. Both governments sharply reduced controllable social spending, lifted controls on business, and cut back unemployment, welfare and other programs of special interest to labor. The squeeze on the private sector was thus translated into a shrinking public sector, with the exception of military spending. The decline of the welfare state, the slowing of social spending, and the end of activist government in the U.S. and U.K. were thus not simply, and indeed not largely, a product of spontaneous disaffection with the socially interventionist state. Not were they the product of an unarticulated, inchoate response to the chronic stagnation of the “British disease” and its American strain. Rather, the rise of new conservative forces that were among the pillars of the Conservative and Republican governments was importantly a product of the formation on both sides of the Atlantic of informal and formal organizational networks linking together most large corporations. These networks facilitated the political mobilization of business - by helping business to identify the public policies most needed for its aggregate welfare, and by helping business to express these preferences in electoral campaigns, government lobbying, and other forms of intervention. There was, however, no certainty of outcome. Although both the Reagan administration and Thatcher government ruled in part because of their corporate allies, neither was particularly responsive to the changing calculus of business, nor of the economy for that matter. In power, these governments were guided by their own agendas, coincident only in part with what large corporations and the inner circle would have liked to see achieved. The formation of a classwide system of organization within the corporate community is rooted in the rise of institutional capitalism, and this system is generically akin to that expected by instrumentalist analysis. But the classwide organization has emerged alongside the far more atomized system based in managerial capitalism and expected by pluralist and structuralist analysis. Thus, both schools of theory and analysis are partly right. Pluralism and structuralism have tended to read the organizational patterns associated with managerial capitalism, while instrumentalism has more often read the patterns associated with institutional capitalism. But both portrayals are partly wrong if overextended in application. And both miss much of the diversity and complexity in the social organization of the corporate community that is fundamental to corporate political behavior. Accordingly, we should revise our thinking about how the corporate community is organized and how it enters the political process. With emergence of classwide organization, more overall planning initiative is assumed by business, less by government. Rather than having to sift through the disparate demands of a thousand chief executives, government officials are presented with an integrated vision already developed by those members of the corporate community best positioned to reconcile the competing demands. Of course government decision makers are subjected to numerous other constraints and pressures, and there is no certainty that any given business position will prevail. Indeed, many are certainly rejected. The Confederation of British Industry and the Business Roundtable were frequently at odds with the Thatcher and Reagan governments. Still, the classwide foundation of the inner circle makes its position more authoritative and less easily ignored. We also need revision in our thinking about the nature of the firm. Under managerial capitalism, corporate principles prevail, and the firm is the primary unit of action. Professional management is fully in charge, the company's profits are the first and final order of business, and a Hobbesian competition of all against all is the environment. The thrust of corporate decisions and politics under managerial capitalism are quite different from those during the era of family capitalism, when upper class principles prevailed, and family was the central unit of action. The founding entrepreneur and kin held control, family fortunes were of guiding concern, and intermarriage produced alliance and reduced competition. But the emergence of institutional capitalism and classwide principles of organization have introduced still different rules. The firm remains a primary unit of action, but the transcorporate network becomes a quasi-autonomous actor in its own right. Company management is now less than fully in charge; classwide issues intrude into company decisions; and competition is less pitched. Management decisions to underwrite political candidates, devote company resources to charitable causes, give advertising space to matters of public moment, and assume more socially responsible attitudes derive in part from company calculus, but also in part from a classwide calculus. Structuralist analysts emphasize the “relative autonomy” of the state, signifying that the government's partial independence from business permits it to more effectively formulate policies facilitating the profitable growth of all large companies.65 We find relative autonomy too, but in a different location. The network of the inner circle arises from a corporate base - but at the same time enjoys a degree of autonomy from it. Yet it is also a limited autonomy, for it is structured in a way that closely channels inner circle actions toward improving the political climate for the entire corporate community. The state may well add further shaping to the policies that emerge from the corporate community, but the relative autonomy of the inner circle now ensures that a significant part of the process of interest aggregation is achieved within the business community itself.

Business and politics in the United States and United Kingdom

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